How writing long fiction differs from short fiction

Oh, long fiction is just more complicated! For me, anyway. I am still figuring it out, to be honest — I’ve only written one novel I can regard with any complacency. (I wrote two lurching horrors before that one, which I may rip up and do over one of these days, but in their current form they barely merit being called novels.) Maybe ask me again in 5-10 years, when I will hopefully have written more than one novel I am satisfied with!

But long fiction can also be more satisfying. I enjoy doing short fiction, and there is a focus and economy about the form that is very rewarding, so I don’t mean to imply that it’s a lesser form than the novel. But the things I’m really interested in as a reader and writer are things that are probably better developed within the larger scope of a novel. I’m interested in people and the dynamics between people, and for spending time with characters and getting to know them there is nothing to beat a book or series of books. I am also a big fan of the carefully chosen superfluous detail — the paragraph or six about someone’s dress or meal that helps immerse the reader in the world of the story — and there’s more space for that sort of thing in longer fiction.

On the complications, the main thing I’ve noticed is how difficult it is to pull >80,000 words into a continuous, coherent story! Firstly it’s hard to keep the story on track when you are only working on it for, say, an hour on average every day for several months. And then when you finally somehow manage to reach the end (keenly conscious that you have completely forgotten about several minor characters on the way, you haven’t wrapped up at least one key subplot, and your protagonist has undergone extraordinary unsupported transformations in her characterisation), you have to fix the mess. And every time you pick one bit of story to fix, you pull up a whole string of connected things you also have to fix. It’s like playing Jenga or something. /o\

I am hoping this will be less of a messy process once I have figured out how to outline before starting a novel. But I suspect it is always going to be quite iterative and involve me suddenly thinking, months after I have written the first draft, “Oh! That’s why Character X did that thing in Chapter 3!” and rushing around looking for a pen and piece of paper.

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